Peter MÉSZÁROS : Narrative Biography
Peter Mészáros is the Eberly Chair Professor Emeritus of Astronomy & Astrophysics and Physics at the Pennsylvania State University, Director Emeritus of the Center for Multimessenger Astrophysics, and currently member of the Executive Committee of the Institute for Gravity and the Cosmos. He served as head of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics in 1993-2003, and served as theory lead of the Swift satellite consortium, member of the IceCube experiment and affiliate of the Fermi satellite consortium, and is currently member of the AMON Astrophysical Multimessenger Observatory Network consortium.
Born in Hungary and raised in Belgium and Argentina, he received his M.S. in Physics from the National University of Buenos Aires, followed by a Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1972. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton and Cambridge Universities before joining the permanent staff of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany. He has held long term visiting appointments at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center; the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; Cambridge University; the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; the California Institute of Technology; and the Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics, UCSB. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, External Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Fellow of the American Physical Society, and Legacy Fellow of the American Astronomical Society; he has been a co-recipient of the Rossi Prize of the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the American Astronomical Society, and the First Prize of the Gravity Research Foundation, as well as a recipient of Guggenheim, Royal Society, Smithsonian and NAS/NRC fellowships; he was awarded an Einstein Professorship of the Chinese Academy of Science in 2013. He was a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics 2006-2022, and is curreently member of the Space Studies Board of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Science Advisory Committee of the IceCube Antarctic Neutrino Observatory.
His main research interests are high energy astrophysics, cosmology and particle astrophysics. He has made significant contributions in the theory of structure formation in the early Universe; the high energy properties of magnetized neutron stars; the physics of gamma-ray bursts; ultra-high energy neutrinos and cosmic rays, and gravitational astrophysics. He is known for the “Mészáros effect” in cosmology, and for his role in the development of the fireball shock model of gamma-ray bursts and the theory of afterglows. Thomson- Reuters ranks his work on gamma-ray bursts as number one by citations and number of papers over the 1999-2009 period. He has written 410+ refereed research articles, three books, 170 invited review or conference papers, with 44,000+ citations and h-index 107 in ADS (67,000+ citations, h-index 129 in Google Scholar). Here is a bibliography, an ADS citation-ranked publication list and a C.V..